Category: China

Last November Synced ran an interview with Yoshua Bengio, in which the deep learning maverick, Université de Montréal Professor and MILA Scientific Director discussed his research and commented on the current state of deep learning and AI.

Beijing winters can be devastating on feral cats, with studies suggesting only about 40 percent make it through the long stretch of cold and harsh weather. A Baidu AI engineer who goes by the alias “Wan’xi” (晚兮) set out to make a difference for vulnerable neighbourhood kitties, and the result is an AI-powered smart shelter system.

It’s not uncommon to find scalpers at concert halls and sporting events, hawking admission tickets at inflated prices. Chinese hospitals however have been invaded by a more problematic breed of scalper — those who deal in the appointment registration tokens that hospitals use to process patient visits.

Welcome to the Year of the Pig! Lunar New Year is China’s biggest holiday, with this year’s celebrations picking up during the “Little Year” period in late January, peaking February 4 for New Year’s Eve, and continuing through February 19.

At CES 2019 in Las Vegas today Chinese tech giant Baidu introduced Apollo Enterprise, a new suite of customizable autonomous driving and Internet of Vehicles (IoV) solutions for mass production vehicles. The company also released Apollo 3.5, the latest and most sophisticated iteration of its open autonomous driving platform, which now supports complex urban and suburban driving environments.

At the 2018 World AI Conference in Shanghai, Tencent Cybersecurity Group and the Cybersecurity Innovation Institute co-published their AI Empowers Cyberspace Security: Patterns and Practices report. The work was sponsored by the Shanghai government.

It did not take long to see the first major AI talent reshuffling of 2019. Multiple sources are now confirming that reputed AI researcher Dr. Tong Zhang left his position as Executive Director of Tencent AI Lab effective December 31. Rumours suggest Zhang might return to teaching.

Tsinghua Natural Language Processing Group (THUNLP) has published a great reading list for any budding AI researchers whose New Year’s resolution is to study machine translation. The list compiles the most influential machine translation papers from the past 30 years, spotlighting the 10 most important contributions to the development of machine translation.

Alibaba Cloud recently announced that it has open sourced Mars — its tensor-based framework for large-scale data computation — on Github. Mars can be regarded as “a parallel and distributed NumPy.” Mars can tile a large tensor into small chunks and describe the inner computation with a directed graph, enabling the running of parallel computation on a wide range of distributed environments, from a single machine to a cluster comprising thousands of machines.

In the latest of a string of bot versus human video game showdowns, Tencent AI Lab’s Strategical Collaborative AI “Juewu” has beat the world’s top human player in the mobile Real Time Strategy (RTS) game “Arena of Valor.” Tencent published the results in the paper Hierarchical Macro Strategy Model for MOBA Game AI.

At the Huawei Intelligent Computing Conference yesterday in Beijing, the Chinese tech giant announced a new intelligent computing strategy for enterprises, launched the world’s first 7nm ARM-based data centre processor, and introduced a new-generation intelligent computing platform.

While previous pregnancy detection techniques relied heavily on human labour, Alibaba’s new “pregnancy diagnosis algorithms” can help. The AI system was developed by Alibaba Cloud engineers in a joint effort with pig farming scientists.

According to Reuters, leading Chinese AI unicorn Megvii Technology (also known as Face++) has begun raising a new round of funding with a target of US$500 million. This would will bring the company’s value to an estimated US$3.5 billion.

Chinese tech giant Tencent’s first attempt in AI healthcare was the Miying platform, which has been a point of pride for CEO Huateng Ma since its 2017 launch. Supported by AI-powered medical imaging technologies, Miying assists doctors with the screening of esophageal cancer, pulmonary nodules, cervical cancer, etc. The platform has been well received in the AI and medical communities, with a fast-expanding market in Chinese top-tier AAA hospitals.

Photos of an artificial intelligence textbook for Chinese preschoolers have gone viral. Artificial Intelligence Experiment Materials is a 33-volume textbook series aimed at Chinese students from kindergarten to high school that was published this July by Henan People’s Publishing House.

The winter holiday shopping season has begun, and just as department stores are dressing up their window displays, so are e-commerce companies working on the product recommendation systems they use to identify and target online shoppers’ wants and needs.

Alibaba has announced it will open-source X-Deep Learning (XDL), the algorithm framework behind its marketing technology and big data platform Alimama. The source code and support documents’ release is slated for December.

China’s respected Peking University will open a new campus with a focus on artificial intelligence and engineering, Xinhuanet has reported. The new campus is set to occupy an area of nearly 4.15 million square metres (approximately 128 football fields) and will be located in Changping, a district situated in the suburbs of northwest Beijing.

In a Politburo group study session last week Chinese President Xi Jinping identified seven sectors where AI promises huge potential, asserting “AI is a key driving force of the new round of scientific revolution and industrial reform.”

Tencent AI Lab unveiled its new intelligent microscope for pathological analysis yesterday at the Tencent Global Partner Conference in Nanjing. The device represents a huge step in the company’s ongoing commitment to ramp up its R&D in AI + medicine.

Baidu CEO Robin Li today gave the world a peek at China’s first Level 4 autonomous driving passenger cars, co-developed by Baidu and carmaker FAW Hongqi. Li introduced the vehicles at the 2018 Baidu World Conference in Beijing. The cars will enter mass production by the end of 2019, and their road debuts will be in Beijing and FAW Hongqi’s hometown of Changchun.

If you’ve ever wondered whether Dota 2 or League of Legends is the most popular multiplayer online battle arena game, or how long you’d need to spend on a treadmill to burn off that party size bag of chips you just ate, you know that you can probably find the answer by accessing a couple of relevant information sources and then applying what seems like a natural and straightforward reasoning process.

Baidu today announced plans for a comprehensive self-driving taxi and bus service in Changsha, the capital of southern Hunan province and birthplace of Mao Zedong. Baidu has signed a partnership agreement with the Changsha Municipal People’s Government and Hunan Xiangjiang New Area Development Group that aims to reinvent the local commute.

Tencent AI Lab has announced an open-source NLP dataset comprising vector representations for eight million Chinese words and phrases. The dataset aims to provide large-scale and high-quality support for deep learning-based Chinese language NLP research in both academic and industrial applications.

Today, we are excited to announce STACL (Simultaneous Translation with Anticipation and Controllable Latency), the first simultaneous machine translation system with anticipation capabilities and controllable latency.

Adding Baidu’s voice will broaden PAI’s understanding of global AI technologies and their ethical implications. Chinese companies are pushing forward with a wide adoption of AI technologies across industries from healthcare to transportation and beyond.

The company made a series of AI-related announcements today at the Huawei Connect 2018 Conference in Shanghai, introducing two AI chips and a machine learning framework. Huawei’s AI push is expected to intensify its battle with domestic rivals Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu in the AI market.

A typical JD motorcycle deliveryman in Shanghai delivers 100 packages per day, racing along the city’s waterfront, navigating tiny alleyways and darting between the city’s skyscrapers. That may seem impressive but JD is still striving to improve motorcycle delivery efficiency with new tech — much of it AI-powered.

Yi Wang will never forget Thursday, September 27, 2018. That’s the day that Liulishuo, the AI-driven English tutoring startup he founded in 2012, went public on the Nasdaq (NYSE:LAIX), raising US$72 million under an estimated market cap of US$600 million.

This August, thousands of Chinese middle school students participated in a two-day “AI teacher vs. Human teacher” competition. Students were separated into two groups: one received math tutoring from experienced teachers, the other from an intelligent learning system.

Chinese Internet mogul Jack Ma has a flair for naming new businesses: Alibaba originates from a character made famous in the One Thousand and One Nights collection of Arabian folk tales; while the company’s R&D arm Damo Academy derives from the name of a Chinese Buddhist monk instrumental in the creation of Shaolin Kung Fu.